Thomas J. Fogarty

Thomas J. Fogarty (1934 to 2025) was an American vascular surgeon and medical device inventor, best known for the embolectomy catheter, often called the balloon catheter. Raised in Cincinnati, he worked as a scrub technician at Good Samaritan Hospital as a teenager, where he saw patients die after open surgery to remove blood clots from limbs. He devised a way to pass a small balloon-tipped catheter through a clot and withdraw it through a small incision, and the device became a standard tool for clot removal and an early minimally invasive surgical device. He studied medicine at the University of Cincinnati, trained in surgery in Oregon, taught at Stanford, and later founded Fogarty Engineering and the Fogarty Innovation incubator. He held a large number of patents and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008.